Category: Komitas

Beginning

We are releasing these short films one every 3 days up until the official commemoration of the Armenian Genocide on 24th April 2015. The first song appears here on Tuesday 24th March 2015. We will also be providing some historical background on specific photographs.

In July this year, Levon and some members of the Chilingirian Quartet will play 2 songs from Komitas at Iona Abbey, Scotland, as part of the Mendelssohn on Mull Festival, to mark the centenary of 1915. It should be a very moving and spiritual occasion in this centre of Christianity on the west coast of Scotland. We’d love to hear your comments on the films Do write to the quartet here This multimedia project created by filmmaker Kevin Laitak

Song 1: Hoy Nazan Im

Levon’s grandfather and mother

My grandfather Levon Chilingirian served as Choirmaster in Baku in the 1890’s and later in Constantinople and Smyrna. He was the first to introduce the organ into the Armenian Church in the early 1900’s. He was exiled to Jerusalem in 1922 where he died in 1934.

“Again, quite wonderful. This is so beautiful. Enchanting music. Great performance again” Ian

Levon Chilingirian writes about the photograph above which features in the next song:

The Boghossian Family is my wife, Susan’s maternal grandparents, later to change their name to Paul in the USA. Stepan and Isgouhi Boghossian (later Paul) had five children in the photo taken in Kessab, circa 1910.
Before Stepan went to the U.S. in 1914 they had a sixth child. Isgouhi was marched to the Deir Zor desert with her children and lost four of them. Her surviving daughter also died soon afterwards. She was a deeply religious woman and always kept her faith and never dwelled on the horrors she must have witnessed. Somehow, husband and wife found each other after the Great War and they moved to the U.S. where Susan’s mother was born in 1922. Helen Paul Pattie is now 93 and living in Minnesota, photographed here in the Lake District, England, 2014.

Song 2: Shoushigi

Song 3: Yergink Ambel (It’s Clouding Over)

Komitas

26th September 1869 -22nd October 1935 was an Armenian priest, musicologist, composer, arranger, singer and choirmaster. He is considered the founder of Armenian national school of music and recognised as one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology. Orphaned at a young age, Komitas was taken technical Cathedral, Armenia’s religious center, where he received education at the Gevorgian Seminary. Following his ordination as vardapet (celibate priest) in 1895, he studied music at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He thereafter “used his Western training to build a national tradition.

He collected and transcribed over 3,000 pieces of Armenian folk music, more than half of which were subsequently lost and only around 1,200 are now extant. Besides Armenian folk songs, he also showed interested in other cultures and in 1904 published the first-ever collection of Kurdish music. His choir presented Armenian music in many European cities, earning the praise of Claude Debussy, among others. Komitas settled in Constantinople in 1910 to escape mistreatment by ultra-conservative clergymen at Etchmiadzin and to introduce Armenian folk music to wider audiences. He was widely embraced by Armenian communities, while Arshag Chobanian called him the “savior of Armenian music”

During the Armenian Genocide along with hundreds of other Armenian intellectuals—Komitas was arrested and deported to a prison camp in April 1915 by the Ottoman government. He was soon released under unclear circumstances and experienced a mental breakdown and developed a severe case of Posttraumatic stress disorder. The widespread hostile environment in Constantinople and reports of mass-scale Armenian death marches and massacres that reached him further worsened his fragile mental state. He was first placed in a Turkish military-operated hospital until 1919 and then transferred to psychiatric hospitals in Paris, where he spent the last years of his life in agony. Komitas is widely seen as a martyr of the genocide and has been depicted as one of the main symbols of the Armenian Genocide in art. (content from Wikipedia)

Interesting article here about Komitas published in The Guardian 2011http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/apr/21/komitas-vardapet-folk-music-armenia from which this is an excerpt:
‘Soghomon Soghomonyan – his original name – was born in 1869 to Armenian parents in Turkey, where the Christian minority endured routine discrimination.. Even in his teens he was a pioneer ethnomusicologist. Using the notation he had learned in the Armenian liturgy, he wrote down what he heard, devised three-part arrangements, and formed a student choir to sing them. Soghomonyan’s appetite for songs was voracious – one day, he noted with pride, he collected 34. His account of the ploughing song he found in the Armenian village of Lori reflects a remarkable ear: in his transcription, music, movement, and complex social relationships are seamlessly interwoven. In another village, he observed a girl singing to her dead mother: her plangently disordered song, he wrote, “expresses the sadness of her lot, and her inner world. If other orphans had heard it, they would have joined in. But after a while, that song would be forgotten. Because for the peasant, creating a song is as ordinary and natural as casual conversation is for the rest of us.” As an encapsulation of the essence of folk music, this could still not be bettered.’

Feedback on the Songs

Lovely to receive feedback about the songs and the project. We love to hear what you think. Keep your comments coming! Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter or email your comments using the contact form at the bottom of the page. Thanks

“This is a beautiful project – thank you so much”, Sossie

Song 9: Haprpan A duet between a boy and a girl

In the final song, ‘ Karoun A’, (It snows in Spring, A young lady loses her love) to be performed here, Levon Chilingirian writes a few observations.
my grandfather (below) was one of many choirmasters and composers who lived and worked in Constantinople from the late 19th Century until the sad events of 1915 and the final exile for surviving Armenians in 1922. He was mostly self- taught and from losing both his parents from a very young age and becoming an orphan he eventually established himself as one of the leading musicians in Constantinople. He was also the first person to introduce the organ into the our Church in the first decade of the 20th Century. The music in the photo below is written in his own hand

Aghtamar Monastry (below) was left into serious disrepair by the Turkish Government until only very recently, when restoration work was carried out to this 1000 year old gem. Until 1915 there was an adjoining Monastry and a thriving community of priests. It is situated on an island on Lake Van, one of the 3 Lakes in Historic Armenia

“I have just heard the ninth postcard. Thank you so much. I have loved them all. Of course I had to listen to them all again to enjoy the wonderful pictures separately. It was particularly moving for me to see the boy Manoug standing with his fiddle behind the big drum (in number 8). And of course I then had to listen to them all again. Your playing is consummate. Lovely passionate sections, and moments of such eloquence and purity.My love and admiration to you all”, Ian

Song 10: Karoun A 

Final song marking Armenian Genocide centenary 24th April 2015

Susie Mészáros, violist of the Chilingirian Quartet, reflects on the playing of the viola part and the songs featured here

This year marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide, which saw the systematic extermination and displacement of a million and a half Armenians by the Turkish state in it’s attempt to rid the Ottoman Empire of an entire Christian people. Such was the scale and cruelty of this genocide that Adolf Hitler himself referred to it when he was preparing to invade Poland, exhorting his generals to be merciless and brutal: “Send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women and children…Only thus shall we gain the living space we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

During the early years of the 20th century and leading up to 1915 an Armenian priest named Komitas was collecting folk songs in much the same way as Bartok and Kodaly did in Hungary – recording and transcribing for posterity the music of the Armenian people. Komitas survived the purge physically, but was mentally destroyed by the experience and spent the rest of his life in anguish, eventually dying in a Paris asylum. Among the Armenian diaspora were many musicians such as the family of Levon Chilingirian, the leader of my quartet: the Chilingirian Quartet, who fled to Cyprus. Also among these was Sergei Azlamazyan, an Armenian cellist and composer and co-founder of the Komitas Quartet who eventually settled in the Soviet Union. Azlamazyan wanted to be able to perform music from his homeland and so arranged for string quartet a number of songs from those collected by Komitas.

My quartet decided it would be a fitting tribute for this important anniversary to film performances of ten of these songs and release one song every three days leading up to the official commemoration day of 24th April. Along with the films there is a wonderful archive of photographs from the family album of Levon Chilingirian and his wife, also Armenian. Levon was the nephew of the great violinist Manoug Parikian, who appears in some of these rare and precious photos. The performances of the songs are interspersed with archive pictures, and the two together make a most poignant and touching record. The songs were filmed in the Armenian church of St Sarkis in London, and the project was devised and produced by filmmaker Kevin Laitak.

There is nothing quite like music to evoke the spirit of a people, the intangibility of which tells certain things more eloquently than words. In music we hear suggested the pattern of language through rhythm, inflection and articulation; the essence of a people’s relationship with dance and movement born from physical activity and labour (think of all the spinning, threshing, ploughing songs…); the overarching mood and disposition of a nation’s psyche. It is a call to the senses in a very direct way, bypassing the cerebral and overtly conscious. Folk songs are passed down through generations as an aural tradition much as the art of playing an instrument is passed down from master to student, by example. So classical musicians revisiting folk song are reminded of the building blocks of their own musical tradition which over time naturally evolves into something more sophisticated, abstract and self-conscious through its refinement. It’s good to make that journey back to one’s cultural fatherland once in a while.

These particular songs are a joy to play. As violist in a quartet my role in repertoire like this would for the most part be fairly fixed and determined. I would mainly be accompanying in the traditional way, providing harmony, texture and rhythm. But happily the viola part has been quite generously provided with solos in these songs, used as it were as an alternative vocal line – the contralto perhaps. The joyful Vahan-Bedelian (1)“hoy Nazan Im” is a boisterous greeting song where the viola stabs through with syncopation and bubbling, rippling lines.

“Shoushigi”, dedicated to a little girl, features a most warm and loving melody which is taken over by the viola for a whole verse. I adore playing this one, with its lilting dotted rhythms and sweet line. In some songs, such as “Al Alayloughs”, the viola has the last word, reminiscing the melody in a more wistful way to round off the song. Quite often the viola makes melodic interjections and commentary, such as in the lugubrious middle section of “Shogher Djan”, dragging the other instruments as if by gravity into the deep viola voice. At other times it provides waves of the most rich and searing harmonies – delicious and seductive.

“Kelly Kelle” is a conversational song about a woman’s admiration of a man’s walking gait! The viola strides along with the main melody, radiating vibrant warmth from the lower strings. Just because the register of the viola is lower than the violin’s doesn’t mean it necessarily depicts the male character – to me it is a deep and mature woman’s voice.

“Karoun A” – the sad Spring song which speaks of a young lady who loses her love. The viola seems to be mourning, weeping long sorrowful notes over and over. “Echmiadzni Bar” is a wild dance, very eastern in character, throughout which the viola plays the same tune as the violin but an octave lower. It is tough and gutsy, later becoming dreamy and filigree, then bursting back to its former punchiness.

“Haprpan” – a boy/girl song, full of conversation and fun, loving and longing. The viola is very busy with rhythms both bowed and plucked as well as the occasional cheeky interjection. The remarkable thing about these songs is the absence of awkwardness in marrying one form – folk song – with the medium of classical instruments. There seems to be no fault-line between the two elements, the best of each shining with ease and without compromise. There is richness, there is simplicity. Azlamazyan uses the instruments in a quite classical way without ever resorting to over-folkiness, yet we are without a doubt hearing folk music.

This has been a most powerful and fulfilling project. These songs are important because they are a magic thread that links us to a society that was all but obliterated. It’s astonishing how the songs together with the images connect us in a very human way with a terrible history that is not widely known in the West. We’ve had incredible feedback on the films, so the last word is from Arderne, one of the many people who wrote to us: “The music is so vibrant and sparkling, which is the more poignant when you consider the horrors which were to overtake these people. It has been a revelation and a joy.”

Article first published in the British Viola Society newsletter, May 2015